Yuk Hui

Digital objects, in their simplest form, are data. They are also a new kind of industrial object that pervades every aspect of our life today--as online videos, images, text files, e-mails, blog posts, Facebook events.Yet, despite their ubiquity, the nature of digital objects remains unclear. On the Existence of Digital Objects conducts a philosophical examination of digital objects and their organizing schema by creating a dialogue between Martin Heidegger and Gilbert Simondon, which Yuk Hui contextualizes within the history of computing. How can digital objects be understood according to individualization and individuation? Hui pursues this question through the history of ontology and the study of markup languages and Web ontologies; he investigates the existential structure of digital objects within their systems and milieux. With this relational approach toward digital objects and technical systems, the book addresses alienation, described by Simondon as the consequence of mistakenly viewing technics in opposition to culture. Interdisciplinary in philosophical and technical insights, with close readings of Husserl, Heidegger, and Simondon as well as the history of computing and the Web, Hui's work develops an original, productive way of thinking about the data and metadata that increasingly define our world.

On the Existence of Digital Objects

A systematic historical survey of Chinese thought is followed by an investigation of the historical-metaphysical questions of modern technology, asking how Chinese thought might contribute to a renewed questioning of globalized technics. Heidegger's critique of modern technology and its relation to metaphysics has been widely accepted in the East. Yet the conception that there is only one—originally Greek—type of technics has been an obstacle to any original critical thinking of technology in modern Chinese thought. Yuk Hui argues for the urgency of imagining a specifically Chinese philosophy of technology capable of responding to Heidegger's challenge, while problematizing the affirmation of technics and technologies as anthropologically universal. This investigation of the historical-metaphysical question of technology, drawing on Lyotard, Simondon, and Stiegler, and introducing a history of modern Eastern philosophical thinking largely unknown to Western readers, including philosophers such as Feng Youlan, Mou Zongsan, and Keiji Nishitani, sheds new light on the obscurity of the question of technology in China. Why was technics never thematized in Chinese thought? Why has time never been a real question for Chinese philosophy? How was the traditional concept of Qi transformed in its relation to Dao as China welcomed technological modernity and westernization? In The Question Concerning Technology in China, a systematic historical survey of the major concepts of traditional Chinese thinking is followed by a startlingly original investigation of these questions, in order to ask how Chinese thought might today contribute to a renewed, cosmotechnical questioning of globalized technics.

An Essay in Cosmotechnics

The Question Concerning Technology in China

This book is an investigation of algorithmic contingency and an elucidation of the contemporary situation that we are living in: the regular arrival of algorithmic catastrophes on a global scale. Through a historical analysis of philosophy, computation and media, this book proposes a renewed relation between nature and technics.

Recursivity and Contingency

Dorion Sagan

Katherine Hayles

Andrew Pickering

Brunella Antomarini

Slava Gerovitch

Mathieu Triclot

Daisuke Harashima

Dylan Levi King

Michał Krzykawski

David Maulen de los Reyes

Cybernetics for the 21st Century Vol.1 is dedicated to the epistemological reconstruction of cybernetics, consisting of a series of historical and critical reflections on the subject – which according to Martin Heidegger marked the completion of Western metaphysics. In this anthology, historians, philosophers, sociologists and media studies scholars explore the history of cybernetics from Leibniz to artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as the development of twentieth-century cybernetics in various geographical regions in the world, from the USA to the Soviet Union, Latin America, France, Poland, China and Japan. The reconstruction shows the various paths of cybernetics and their socio-political implications, which remain unfamiliar to us today. It reveals more than what we thought we knew – and yet we hardly know – and allows us to understand where we are and to reflect on the future of technology, ecology and planetary politics. 

With texts by Brunella Antomarini, Slava Gerovitch, Daisuke Harashima, Katherine Hayles, Yuk Hui, Dylan Levi King, Michał Krzykawski, David Maulen de los Reyes, Andrew Pickering, Dorion Sagan and Mathieu Triclot. 

Volume 1: Epistemological Reconstruction

Cybernetics for the 21st Century

O livro reúne os principais textos do filósofo da tecnologia, Yuk Hui, uma das figuras mais influentes no debate sobre tecnologia, inteligência artificial e o que ele chama de "cosmotécnicas", tecnologias desenvolvidas em contextos locais, particulares, que conteriam as saídas para a atual crise ecológica, política e social mundial. A tecnologia foi sempre pensada como um conhecimento universal, resultado do processo de superação da dependência do homem de seus órgãos. Não há uma única tecnologia, mas sim uma tecnodiversidade – uma multiplicidade de cosmotécnicas que diferem umas das outras em seus valores, epistemologias e formas de existência. A superação da conjuntura atual, marcada por uma crise ecológica e moral, depende de uma política de decolonização em benefício de uma pluralidade de cosmotécnicas que poderão contribuir para a criação de novos futuros tecnológicos. Eis como a cosmotécnica ganha uma dimensão cosmopolítica.

Tecnodiversidade

In light of current discourses on AI and robotics, what do the various experiences of art contribute to the rethinking of technology today? Art and Cosmotechnics addresses the challenge of technology to the existence of art and traditional thought, especially in light of current discourses on artificial intelligence and robotics. It carries out an attempt on the cosmotechnics of Chinese landscape painting in order to address this question, and further asks: What is the significance of shanshui (mountain and water) in face of the new challenges brought about by the current technological transformation? Thinking art and cosmotechnics together is an attempt to look into the varieties of experiences of art and to ask what these experiences might contribute to the rethinking of technology today.

Art and Cosmotechnics

This book is an investigation of algorithmic contingency and an elucidation of the contemporary situation that we are living in: the regular arrival of algorithmic catastrophes on a global scale. Through a historical analysis of philosophy, computation and media, this book pro...

Andreas Broeckmann

In 1985, the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard curated a groundbreaking exhibition called Les Immatériaux at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The exhibition showed how telecommunication technologies were beginning to impact every aspect of life. At the same time, it was a material demonstration of what Lyotard called the post-modern condition. This book features a previously unpublished report by Jean-François Lyotard on the conception of Les Immatériaux and its relation to postmodernity. Reviewing the historical significance of the exhibition, his text is accompanied by twelve contemporary meditations. The philosophers, art historians, and artists analyse this important moment in the history of media and theory, and reflect on the new material conditions brought about by digital technologies in the last 30 years. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

Art, Science and Theory

30 Years After Les Immatériaux

In 1985, the French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard curated a groundbreaking exhibition called Les Immateriaux at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The exhibition showed how telecommunication technologies were beginning to impact every aspect of life. At the same time, it was a material demonstration of what Lyotard called the postmodern condition. This book features a previously unpublished report by Jean-Francois Lyotard on the conception of Les Immateriaux and its relation to postmodernity. Reviewing the historical signifi cance of the exhibition, his text is accompanied by twelve contemporary meditations. The philosophers, art historians, and artists - among them Bernard Stiegler, Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Anne-Elisabeth Sejten and Jean-Louis Boissier - analyse this important moment in the history of media and theory, and refl ect on the new material conditions brought about by digital technologies in the last 30 years."

Art, Science, and Theory

Pieter Lemmens

This volume is initial reflections on the meaning and the implications of Yuk Hui’s notion of cosmotechnics, which opens up an anti-universalist and pluralist perspective on technology beyond the West. Martin Heidegger’s famous analysis of the essence of technology as enframing and as rooted in ancient Greek techne has had a crucial influence on the understanding and critique of technological society and culture in the twentieth century. However, it is still unclear to what extent his analysis can also be applied to the development of technology outside of ‘the West’, e.g. in China, Africa, and Latin America, particularly against the backdrop of receding Western domination and impending global ecological disaster. Acknowledging the planetary expansion of Western technology already observed by Heidegger, yet also recognizing the existence of non-Western origins of technical relationships to the cosmos, Yuk Hui’s notion of cosmotechnics calls for a rethinking – in dialogue with decolonial studies and the so-called ontological turn in contemporary anthropology – of the question concerning technology which challenges the universality still present in Heidegger (as well as in Simondon and Stiegler) and proposes a radical technological or rather cosmotechnical pluralism or technodiversity. The contributors to this volume critically engage with this proposal and examine the possible implications of Hui’s cosmotechnical turn in thinking about technology as it becomes a planetary force in our current age of the Anthropocene. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

For a Renewed Concept of Technology in the Anthropocene

Cosmotechnics

Claudia Schmuckli

Janna Keegan

An investigation of the cultural and academic discourse around new technology through a lens of artistic practice In 1970 Japanese engineer Masahiro Mori introduced the concept of the "uncanny valley" as a terrain of existential uncertainty that humans experience when confronted with autonomous machines that mimic their physical and mental properties. As subjectivities are increasingly organized and shaped by algorithms that track and evaluate our data, the question of what it means to be human has shifted. The featured artists mine the tropes and modalities of AI and machine learning for critical and aesthetic potential, proposing new ways of thinking about intelligence, nature, and artifice.

Yuk Hui

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